Limbo: a new Red Hat Linux beta [LWN.net]

Limbo: a new Red Hat Linux beta

Posted Jul 4, 2002 8:30 UTC (Thu) by DeletedUser2427 ((unknown), #2427)
Parent article: Limbo: a new Red Hat Linux beta

Great, and thanks RH!

Now to my question:

Won't there be, this time, also 586 versions?
(and not only 386)

Most of the future users of this future release (at least 90% in my humble opinion), will install it under P4, so even 586 is a compromise. 386 compatibility is an ancient thing.

I don't know the exact difference in performance, but I'm sure that using the extra capabilities of P4, or at least 586, gives much more power.

This is what Mandrake does.

So this great version (will become 8.0 one day...), will be even greater with this extra power...

Thanks again!

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Limbo: a new Red Hat Linux beta -- processor-specific versions of other packages

Posted Jul 4, 2002 20:29 UTC (Thu) by tjc (guest, #137) [Link]

Won't there be, this time, also 586 versions?

Red Hat includes i586, i686, and Athlon kernels, and an i686 version of glibc. I suspect that the performance improvements that would result from processor-specific versions of other packages would be very small, which is why they don't include them.

Performance aside, they could do it as a marketing ploy targeted at "checklist" customers, but I don't think we should applaud them if they did that.

Limbo: a new Red Hat Linux beta -- processor-specific versions of other packages

Posted Jul 5, 2002 4:19 UTC (Fri) by smoogen (subscriber, #97) [Link]

Other than a couple of packages (gzip, ssl, and ???) the speed improvements were no more than 10% if you compiled everything for a specific architecture (i686 for the P4). Also realize that i586 optimizations can cause slowdowns on i686 systems.. and dont even get into what happens on an AMD/cyrix/etc cpu. Having i386 with some exceptions (kernel, glibc, and a couple of apps) is the safest for most customers...